November 5th, 1981
by brainchild
Summary: Will McGrath had only known the Potters as heroes, ideals. They'd been Head Boy and Girl his second year, and he'd worshiped them, but now he was going to their funeral and it felt like the world was broken because everyone else seemed to be celebrating.


**Author's Note: This story takes place in the McGrath Universe, created and maintained in AnotherDreamer's Prelude to Destiny and Holden107's Backfire. Both are posted under the name Brainchild at It is advised that you read one of those stories before reading this one, just because the characters will have more meaning for you. Enjoy either way,**

**Miranda**

**---**

**November 5th, 1981**

You and Chad silently enter the church where their funeral will take place.

It's a two-part funeral: one for the public, one for the family. In total, it's eight hours to grieve; eight hours to see pictures of them on the walls, smiling and dancing; eight hours of speeches commemorating their lives and sacrifice; four hours for the public, four hours for the friends, the only family either of them had. And all the hours feel like a cold knife in the side.

How will you make it through this time?

The middle-aged usher recognizes you and Chad as friends of the deceased; he motions for you to sit in the front, but you shake your head slightly. The real mourners, the one's expected to sit in the front pew, are congregated in the very last row, devastated and isolated amongst the hundreds who came here ostensibly to respect the dead but are secretly gleeful. This, to them, is little more than a celebration the last funeral for a victim of Voldemort. You glare at them. They don't deserve to pretend to care.

Chad takes the seat beside your sister-in-law. You sit beside him and realize ironically, that this, for you, is the first war funeral as well as the last.

People have died these last few years—died fighting, died of disease, died at the hands of Death Eaters—but there was never enough time or a secure enough location to have a proper funeral for most of them. Even when your siblings died, there was just a private ceremony. It's a marked change, this opened-door funeral, one that is a symbol of the promise of times to come and a reminder of the price it cost.

You hate it.

Mourning does not suit you. You want to talk and make people laugh, but the heroic deaths of Lily and James Potter quells your listless movements. It feels like someone cut into your chest, stole and cracked a piece of your past you were unwilling to share.

It feels like someone went back in time and sucker-punched your eleven-year-old self.

The priest speaks. The crowd hushes. The baby on your brother's lap is not the only one to have the audacity to demand attention at this ceremony, but he is the only one you forgive. The woman howling in the front row that just happens to be sitting next to a group of photographers is a different story. It's the same with the politicians in the front row vying to look the most destroyed by these two particular deaths.

You look around the room, the priest's words slipping past you, and catch sight of a black-haired woman sitting inconspicuously in the middle of the church. That's surprising—not because she's quiet, she is always that way, but because she dared to come at all. You look over at Chad and see that he has already noticed her, his sister, clad from head to two in the most fashionable black robes of the season. When you catch his eye, he briefly shakes his head and turns back to the front of the church, as if to tell you it isn't worth thinking about.

The speaker goes on, but you are more concerned with the man that just walked through the back entrance. Remus John Lupin stands, devastated, as he takes in the room. His is the unspoken story that will soon become a legend: the man who lost his two best friends in a single night to the one who betrayed them all. How, they wondered, can he ever be helped?

His shoulders are hunched, skin sallow, eyes wary and angry. You stand, ready to help the man you don't think you've spoken to since you were a first year, but a second arrival halts your movement. Gertrude Wrightman enters the church then, pausing to stand beside Remus.

They make a strange tableau, standing together, this haggard man and this tiny aristocrat. They are both just twenty-two years old, heads of their families because of unnatural deaths, and here to grieve for two people who made the world safe again. They make you feel young and innocent.

They don't look at each other—don't look at anyone—as they walk into the church. Your brother Matt and his wife Christine stand and make their way out of the pew and toward Remus and Gertrude. Matt shakes both of their hands and Christine stands trying not to cry when Remus suddenly hugs her. She clings to him, he who shares her grief. The world plays cruel tricks on the people brave enough to love.

When she steps back and motions for them to sit beside you, she gently takes Gertrude Wrightman's hand and leads her into the pew, where Christine sits beside you, followed by Gertrude and then Remus and Matt.

In the brief moment between standing and sitting, Remus looks at you with his hollow eyes. He nods almost imperceptibly and you find yourself watching Gertrude Wrightman, who looks so small beside him. You've never seen her looking anything but pretty, if snobbish, and now she just looks tired.

Slowly the ceremony starts again as everyone pretends the interlude never happened. Reporters scratch notes with fancy quills. Photographers snap pictures of the imposing podium and beautiful coffins. The politicians speak eloquent words prepared to make them look sympathetic. When the Minister of Magic stands, you purposefully try to relax. But you can't. The tension, the sadness, the hurt—it lives in your shoulders.

"We come to mourn the terrible loss of James and Lily Potter," he begins.

Never one to hold back judgment, Christine loudly mutters, "Liar."

A few people turn around as if to reprimand her with their mere gaze, but then they notice who said it and who sits beside her and they turn away again, ashamed. They know the real mourners when they seem them—red-rimmed, deaden eyes, pale in the back pew.

Only the photographers refuse to turn and instead lift their cameras as if to take a photo. Matt looks at the front of the church, refusing to acknowledge them. You were never that good a person, and quickly cast a Magnetic Charm on three of the cameras, causing them to smash into one another. But before the rest of the photographers get their due, an usher takes things into his own hands, walking directly into their line of sight to block potential pictures. You are grateful, you suppose, though breaking a few more would have let you work off this anger and sadness. Would have distracted you.

The Lily you knew, who taught you how to avoid prefects and when to sneak into the kitchens, would never want to be mourned. No, not Lily Potter. She'd probably tell you lot not to go to the funeral at all. You almost laugh, thinking about that, but it gets caught in your throat.

Lily and James Potter should be sitting beside you. Not dead. Not lying in coffins because of _Voldemort_. You hate that a lunatic cast them from the world. You hate that Lily and James won't be coming to Christmas this year. You hate that in addition your grief and anger and disappointment and sadness, you also feel relieved that Voldemort's gone.

"They died to guarantee that the world had a protector in their stead," the Minister's word seep into your ears. He is an aging man, and you don't expect him to keep the occupation much more than a year, but he speaks well and in the height of the war that was what was most important: public perceptions and pretty speeches.

But no matter what he says, you don't believe Lily and James dying was okay merely because it rid the world of Voldemort. That might sound ridiculous, but you are seventeen and, while wizened and hardened by years of war, full of a youthful idealism often found in those old enough to want to have a cause but too young to have started fighting for one.

"Mrs. Potter represented a bridge between the Muggle and Magical worlds, one we hope to maintain and preserve out of respect for this great woman," he says, glancing at the coffin as if the woman in it were alive and listening, instead of unfairly dead.

You lower your eyes and try not to listen anymore.

How can she be dead?

You take a deep breath, trying not to feel the hole in your chest when the Minister justifies the Potter deaths by saying that Harry Potter exists.

War made this an terrifying world for you and those of your generation. Nights were difficult, but the mornings—with the arrival of the _Prophet _and the proclamations of death covering the front page—were awful. But in the evil, dark times, Lily Potter was like a second sister to you, and visiting her made you feel like this dark time was only temporary. She introduced you to your girlfriend Ginger, the one you planned to marry young in case the war stole the option of marrying her at all. And now Lily is the one that has let you push back your engagement and enjoy being young. But somehow you aren't happy or even grateful for that opportunity. Instead, you find yourself feeling guilty for breathing.

"I would ask all of us to remember Harry Potter as a means of honoring James and Lily Potter. They were the perfect couple, loving and kind, and we ought to remember the greatness of their son," the man says.

Perfect. Perfect is the word the world will use to describe them from that moment on. You were too young to have really known Lily and James as people, instead of ideals, so to you the word fits. You remember them dancing at Matt's wedding, laughing as they patrolled the corridors. You remember her blowing up walls and him sneaking back into school. You remember the stories whispered in the Great Hall after they graduated: they were fighting Voldemort; they had escaped from him three times; no Death Eater could catch them.

They were everything you wanted to be. But now you are, and because of them, you will never have to fight a war like they did. Never have to be a hero like them.

Your anger and frustration and memories strike a Splintering Curse in your chest as you stare at the pew in front of you and let your eyes unfocus. How can this hurt so much when all you knew of them came through infrequent letters and five-year-old memories?

A hand grabs yours, and you see it is Christine's. On her right sits Gertrude Wrightman, compact, tense, and unwilling to comfort others. You squeeze your sister-in-law's hand. She knew the Potters. She knew them better than almost anyone. And though she came to mourn your oldest sibling's deaths, you've never seen your tall, fun sister-in-law like this: her face closed off to all emotion even as tears flood down her face and silent sobs shake her body, she refuses to look away from the front of the church. She is strong and weak, in that moment, broken and rebuilding. She is beautiful and powerful and so very, very devastated.

If you care to think about it, you've never really seen anyone as they are during this funeral. Your brother Matt sits stoically, jaw clenched and proud eyes filled with unshed tears, holding your nephew Andrew quietly in his lap. Your best friend Chad stares without focus at the wall; his sister Samantha with her husband sit apart from them all near the front of the church, eyes full of pain without a tear on her face. Gertrude Wrightman quietly looks smaller and tenser than you thought she could, and Remus Lupin is bent over in his seat, his head in his hands, without a single person to comfort him, make him laugh, or play another prank.

In the front row there are politicians, looking sad as they speak of a brighter tomorrow. In the back row there are best friends, lives lying broken at the base of two plain closed coffins.

And then there is your sister Tracy apart from you all, standing in the recesses of the church crying and looking angry, but also sort of relieved. You have to look away in order to not feel bitter toward her. You have lost two siblings to this war, but sometimes it feels like three with the way Tracy's ran away.

The speaker asks Dumbledore to say a few words, but the old wizard shakes his head. And you feel a wave of disappointment. Of all the speakers who have come today, Dumbledore would be the only one you might listen to and believe.

The speeches drag on and yet pass in a moment. This terrible day—both long and short—has trapped you where you sit, clutching Christine's hand.

But as much as you hate this ceremony, as much as you hate the people in the front and hate the speeches the politicians talking about the happy days ahead, you are glad to have come. Glad because your presence—and the presence of Christine and Matt and Chad and even Tracy and Sam—serves to focus this day where it belongs: on the two people who died.

Hurt, angry, and sad as you are, you find solace in the fact that they died together, for you can't imagine them apart.

But then you remember the son they left behind. The son that will never attend his parents' funeral. The one the Ministry is hiding from the public at a location they refuse to divulge. The son in whom all of your hopes had rested, who had done, at the age of one, what no one had imagined possible.

How has it come to this?

The speaker recites some liturgy and you can't bring yourself to listen as you bow your head to blink back the tears you won't let fall. That Lily would not have wanted you to let fall. Crying made her uncomfortable. Crying for her would have mortified her.

The man finishes speaking and asks for any other public speeches. A few people glance around, wondering if this would be an appropriate way to get their names in the paper.

No one in the last row considers talking because they all know that only one person really has the right to stand there, and instead he is in a prison.

If you ever dared think about the way the Potter funeral might happen, you all know it would have included a eulogy from Sirius Black that would break every heart. But his choices have already done as much, and even to think of him makes you grind your teeth.

He was taken immediately to Azkaban and not allowed visitors. Lily would have hated the injustice of it all. She would have forgiven him, probably, because he was Sirius Black and she could never stay mad at him more than a minute, an infuriating truth. You wish there had been a trial because without one, without facing the criminal and seeing in his eyes that he was guilty, the image of him in your mind will always be of the Sirius Black at the Potter wedding—the laughing, happy man who danced with Lily and hugged James goodbye. You would rather have the permanent image be of him in chains, his Dark Mark displayed in plain sight.

"At least Harry got Voldemort," Remus whispers in his broken voice, and you suspect he had not meant to say it aloud. "At least he's gone."

"At least they died together. As heroes," Gertrude Wrightman says, still tiny and fragile, echoing your thoughts.

They sit, these two vastly different people, and nod together. Like you, they find no comfort in the speaker's word, but in each other they find a devastated kinship that represents their last link to the world.

Instead of guilt, your simmering anger and restlessness stems from your inability to evoke revenge. You hadn't realized you wanted to hurt Voldemort so much. For the last few years you have gotten through school and lessons and holidays by assuring yourself that when you left school you would be useful. You would have a purpose. Joining the fight after leaving school was an inevitable decision.

But now you have no decision at all. Only the promise of a "brighter tomorrow."

After it becomes clear that no one is willing to speak in front of the reporters and the grand public audience, the public half of the ceremony is called to an end. But no one around you rises. The last pew waits, like the coffins themselves, for the first wave of mourners to leave the friends in peace. But the strangers, fame-hunters and respect-payers are slow to leave, standing to chat quietly and nod, happiness and a cautious acceptance of the newly safe world growing in their eyes.

You are surprised when Chad stands. You look questioningly at him. His face is colder and more distant than you've ever seen it as he turns from you to walk to the front of the church. You watch, confused, until you see him approach his sister and lead her out of the church.

You stand quickly, signaling Matt silently that you need to follow Chad. Matt notices Sam and nods too. You leave, then, to follow your best friend to the place where you see him talking to his sister, and you wonder shortly where her husband went. And everyone else. They stop in the garden of the church, too far for conversation to carry to any nearby ears.

Walking up to stand staggered behind Chad, you watch Sam's classic beauty transform into a mask of indifference as she says, "I did what was right, what I thought I had to do to protect the family."

"So you married the man that probably planned to kill Lily and James?" Chad asks. You stiffen, unable to deny that you yourself had such thoughts about Nott. But in your seven years of friendship you've never heard Chad use that tone of insolent anger with anyone, let alone his family.

"Don't talk about my husband that way." Sam's dark brown eyes flash and you take a step forward, still behind Chad. This is a day to respect the Potters, and she dares to defend her husband?

"Then don't pretend he's not a Death Eater," Chad says. Sam closes the gap between her younger brother and her a bit more, checking quickly to make sure you are all alone.

"I know what he's suspected of," Sam says. You can't and don't want to hide how upsetting you find that admission. "And you know as well as I do that the other side was winning. They were. And they might still win. You-Know-Who could come back and my marriage would keep us all safe."

"If you weren't my sister and a lady, I would spit in your face for saying such a thing," Chad says. You look at your best friend. Have you ever heard him like this? No. Probably not. But it's good to hear. He needs to say this.

"Marrying him protected us all. It's what I had to do," Sam parrots.

"This is _not _what you had to do," Chad snaps. "You did not have to marry a suspected Death Eater. You did not have to unite our family with his. You did not have to produce an heir within a year to solidify the deal. We would have rather our named ended with honor like the Prewetts than accept this type of protection."

Sam looks hurt, probably realizing that her own fear of fighting did nothing but hurt her proud family. "Our parents were making enemies."

"They announced their beliefs," Chad says, angry. "Don't delude yourself into believing that you protected us with this alliance. You only ensured that you have no place amongst friends at this funeral. No place beside Christine or Matt or even Diana Halbur."

"You are young," Sam says in her own clipped way. "You lived in a protected castle while I struggled to keep us alive. People who actually fought in the war know about sacrifice, and Lily certainly understood what I did."

"You do not deserve to mourn Lily Evans, who probably did forgive you for this betrayal. She faced death three times without flinching and only hid to save her son. You made the choice, fearing an imagined future, to protect _yourself_. I'm ashamed that you came here today, sister. I'm ashamed that you didn't cry and that you hid your repentance, if you felt it at all, so well that I could not see it."

Sam stands still in front of you both.

"I will forgive you for this some day, Sam," Chad says, "because you are family and my sister, but I am the new head of the family, as you decided when you took the name Nott, and I want you to know that my family will not sit idly by as the next generation of Caldwells is raised a Nott. We will be in your son's life, loving and guiding him, and he may hate you for the name he is heir to, but that is the price you must pay for what you've done."

Chad speaks with an authority that surprises you. You've never seen him like this, taking control of the situation. But whether or not you understand his demeanor, you stand beside him to support and defend his words because he is your best mate. And that's what best mates do. Sirius Black and James Potter taught you that.

He was a best friend, and you can't imagine someone betraying that relationship. But nor could you have imagined Chad's sister looking so resigned before meeting her brother's steely gaze and nodding. And while she did look briefly regretful, you have known her long enough to know that she will be loyal to her marriage out of stubborn dedication to tradition.

Sam Disapparates, and you and Chad are left alone outside the church.

Your best mate of seven years looks at you as if daring you to challenge the words he spoke.

"You going to say something to me about that?" Chad asks.

"How long have you known me?" you ask, surprised that he would think you'd reprimand him for telling someone off. He closes his mouth and nods, though his eyes seem focused on a spot in the distance.

"She shouldn't have come," Chad says, his tone final. You shake your head at him as you sit on the brick wall surrounding the church gardens.

"If anything happened to your sister, you know Lily would have gone to her," you say, more because it's true than because you think it's right. Lily Potter helped people whether or not they deserved it, whether or not they would return the favor. She had a respect for the bonds of friendship and family, no matter how old or frayed.

But the very worst part about this funeral is that you know Lily would have laughed at the spectacle. She'd have said people came at first for James and for her son, but mostly to celebrate the defeat of Voldemort. And if she saw the number of friends pouring into the church for the second half, still she would have found a reason to believe it was meant for others. Even the tears of the devastated best friends would have an explanation in her mind that had nothing to do with her; such was her intense humility.

"You're not going to marry her, are you?" Chas asks, sitting on the wall beside you, staring at that same distant spot. You look at him.

"What? Who?" You were been so intent on thinking about Lily that you couldn't quite understand what he was talking about.

"Ginger," Chad answers. "You're not going to marry her, are you?" When you open your mouth to reply, to say this isn't the time to talk about the future, the wrong words come out.

"No," you admit. "Probably not."

Chad nods and you know you don't have to explain, but you want to.

"I guess part of the reason I wanted to marry her in the first place was because I—" You stop speaking and choose to look at the stain glass window of the church. "I thought I'd die fighting, I suppose."

Chad kicks his heel against the wall.

"Why couldn't Sam have accepted that possibility?" Chad asks, and you understand why he brought this subject up.

You shrug. "She did what she—"

"If you tell me she did what she thought was right, I'll hex you across this yard," Chad says.

"She did what she could to keep herself from having her own coffin," you finish, clenching your jaw as memories of the dead suddenly overwhelm you. You stand to face your friend. Chad just looks at you as he too stands and the pair of you make your way back into the church.

"It's rubbish, what she said about us not understanding," Chad says. "We're seventeen, but we've lost people too. Why did she have to run to the Death Eaters?"

Why did Sirius Black take the mark? "She did what she could to protect herself, no matter the cost, because she was afraid."

Chad shakes his own head now, angry. "You afraid?"

Walking back into the church, seeing the coffins in the front, covered in flowers, you answer quietly, "Not anymore."


End file.
